While he may be known for being an iconoclast, Bob Dylan has a public persona — aloof, remote, borderline misanthropic — that doesn’t exactly lend itself to the typical Hollywood treatment. That hasn’t stopped the new Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, from trying. Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric and starring Timothée Chalamet doing his own live singing and performing as Dylan, the film has picked up rave reviews for its performances. But some critics have had misgivings about the film’s many fictional liberties as well as the relatively little context we’re given for the beats of his life — not enough to either satisfy Dylanites or explain what’s happening for Dylan newbs.
Why exactly was it such a big deal when Dylan “went electric” — plugging in his guitar and moving away from the folk music he made when he started out? What does his musical and personal legacy mean, and why should audiences care?
Fortunately, I found a longtime Dylanhead who was able to fill in many of the gaps for me. Bill DeVillea 40-year radio industry veteran, DJs near-nightly for Minneapolis public radio station The Currentin the city where Dylan first got his early start before traveling to New York. DeVille walked me through the context I was missing, and waxed rhapsodic about the experience of seeing the film as A Dylan Guy. I may be a Dylan fan now through sheer osmosis.
Aja Romano: One of the central tensions of the film is this supposed tension between folk and rock. I know that’s part of the longstanding narrative around Bob Dylan, but when you were watching the film, did you feel like it’s an authentic narrative?
Bill DeVille: I think it is. I think his musical love wasn’t necessarily folk music right out of the gate. I think it was blues and rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t want to say rock, because to me, rock is Journey. Rock ‘n’ roll is the real stuff. Fats Domino, Little Richard, Buddy Holly — I think that was the music that he really loved. He discovered Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie and stuff like that, and it took him toward folk. Plus, he didn’t have a band at the time, so it was easy to go out and just busk with your acoustic guitar at the coffee houses in New York.
So folk was more of a detour for him.
I get that impression. The first gigs he had were under the name Elston Gunn back in the latter ’50s. He was playing in Bobby Vee’s band — he was the piano player. He’s always talked about his love for Little Richardtoo. That was his hero, more so or as much as Woody, I would imagine.
It sounds as though it was the culture of folk, more than the music itself, that took him on his way.
I think there’s some truth to that, but you’re constricted by this timeline. It’s a nifty timeframe, when he rolls out of Minneapolis in 1961 and immediately heads to the Big Apple. In the movie, they said he did it solo, but apparently he did it with a friend.
That gets into the tropes the movie’s playing with — a small-town boy goes to the big city, right? Can you set the stage for us in terms of what the actual New York scene was at the time?
Well, it was the coffee house scene. It was Dave Van Ronk and Pete Seeger. And Joan Baez was around in that scene, too, and Cisco Houston and some of the old folk guys and Dylan — in the film, it shows him just knocking ’em dead right out of the gate. And Joan Baez saw something — they saw something special in each other, which was pretty cool to see. It just seems like Bob had a handful of songs he was already working on at that point. Plus he was doing a lot of covers back then, too. The first album came out and it was pretty much all covers except for “Song to Woody.”
The first time I heard that Bob Dylan song, “Song to Woody,” it made me cry. And man, in that movie, when it’s performed by Timothée, believe it or not, when he sang the song, it was just like, oh my God, this is so good. It sounds so much like Bob. He was very believable.
I think people have been really surprised at the authenticity of that performance. I don’t think it’s something people would’ve expected from him.
He’s gone the extra mile. At the big rollout red carpet deal, he shows up as Bob Dylan incognito.
Yes! That was the New York premiere of A Complete Unknown, where Chalamet cosplayed Dylan’s notorious 2003 fashion at the Sundance premiere of his then-panned movie Masked and Anonymous.
He had bangs and a stocking cap on and a scarf and a leather jacket that was pulled straight from Dylan. It was hysterical.
He apparently had five and a half years to study the role, because of the pandemic and the strike. I don’t know that he was ever even any kind of a musician, but he sings with authenticity and plays the harmonica and the guitar. All the songs were performed live in the movie, which is pretty incredible too.
That’s the draw. Most people are not going to go to this film being like, “I want to know all about this Pete Seeger dynamic. I want to know all about the Newport Folk Festival.” Most people are going to come for the music, and for them to nail that really shows a level of respect.
Were there some moments that threw you? Too much fan service? I do feel like you have to approach this film with several layers of Dylan knowledge.
I saw it maybe as a bit too much of a fanboy. I was in love with the film. Some of the younger generation, I don’t think, got it. But so much of it is based on things that really did happen. Like Newport Folk, when Pete — they didn’t really get into the cutting of the power too much, but Pete really thought about doing it. He didn’t, obviously, but he considered it.
That moment — when Edward Norton as Pete Seeger looks pointedly at an axe during Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival — did baffle people. And especially when you look at the commentary for the time, historians are divided on whether his decision to play electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was actually the controversial thing. When you look at primary sources, some people said that they were booing because the sound was bad and they just couldn’t hear what was happening. That it was not actually about him playing electric.
I do think there was a pretty good round (of controversy). That whole tour of ’65, it seemed in particular — like the person yelling, “Judas!” — that actually happened in (Manchester), England. And they put that in the film too, even though it happened across the pond, not Newport, Rhode Island.
But I think there was some truth to the idea that people wanted him to be this folk purist. I think for Dylan that whole thing was a little too precious. He just wanted to rock.
Why do you think the film ended on that particular note?
I don’t know, but I think it was important. It could have gone either way. I mean, think about it: Bob could have been this legendary folk musician, purist guy, and he could have been twice as popular as Pete Seeger, but he chose not to. I don’t think he wanted to be constrained by the folk thing. The folk canon is good enough, but Bob had all these songs. He wanted to do it his way. He didn’t want to be manipulated, and his way was to play rock ‘n’ roll, I think.
He wasn’t an old guy. He was in his really low 20s when he first started busking with his acoustic guitar. And the British invasion was just happening too. I think he saw that rock ‘n’ roll was what was going on, and he wanted to be a part of it. Nobody wants to be pigeonholed or typecast, and he was more than a folk traditionalist.
I think the fact people didn’t want him to do it made him want to (play rock music) even more. It spurred him on. And he still continued to play some folk songs, so it wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. Maybe it was back then, but I never found it to be that big of a deal. It was, “there are two kinds of music, good and bad.”
The film positions Pete Seeger in this role of mentor-doppelgänger, almost. When the film opens, Seeger is appearing in court on contempt charges for his conduct before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Then we see Dylan meeting Guthrie and Seeger at Guthrie’s hospital bedside. Though he did meet both artists soon after his arrival in New York, neither of these details is true.
I guess it’s about setting Pete Seeger up as a kind of rebel in his own way. He was like the kingpin at the time. Woody was laid up with Huntington’s diseaseso he wasn’t well. I think Woody was more of a mentor to him than Pete was, although the film doesn’t necessarily show it like that. Obviously he idolized Woody, but in the film, Pete took care of him, and he stayed at his house a few different nights.
Pete didn’t really write songs like Bob Dylan did — that wasn’t his thing. He maintained the folk canon. But I do think that Seeger had a huge admiration for and was sort of a hero to Dylan.
Folk was a vital form of resistance at that time, so it makes sense that, character-wise, Dylan would be drawn to that.
Yeah — and the (1963 March on) Washington with Joan Baezthat was huge. But you see in (Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary) No Direction Home that the press were questioning him like he was some sort of radical, and he really wasn’t very radical.
The film treated Johnny Cash as a giant Easter Egg, with Boyd Holbrook playing him as Dylan’s penpal. What did you make of their relationship?
(Cash) just spurred him on. He loved it. And that is kind of true, because he took (Dylan) under his wing when he had The Johnny Cash Show back in the late ’60s, after Dylan made the Nashville Skyline album. I think that Johnny Cash had a great, great respect for Bob, and it was mutual. They wrote letters back and forth over the years.
I do think that relationship contributed to the film’s commentary about the genre mixing. Especially to younger generations who are coming to see the film — they may not be as familiar with Dylan, but they’re definitely familiar with Johnny Cash’s many rock covers and other genre-mixing, and they’re bringing that context with them into the film.
If I’m coming into this film for the first time, what should I know about Dylan’s legacy and influence?
You should know that he’s one of the most important songwriters ever. I’d listen to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home. Those are the three albums that are focused on most in the movie.
I couldn’t believe how blown away I was when he sat down in the care center, in front of Woody and Pete, and he did “Song to Woody.” And you realize the importance and significance of him meeting his hero, and how important it was that he found him and was able to play a song for him.
I didn’t really expect that. I expected the big moments of the electrified stuff at the end of the film, but it was a touching sweet little moment. I was just so captivated after seeing that that I just loved the whole experience of seeing the film.
It didn’t strike you as cocky?
It probably was cocky. But I think it took everything he had to muster to do it. And he did it.
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